Comparator circuits can be employed as general purpose input buffers to provide signal conditioning for an input signal with respect to a fixed reference voltage at the comparator. Such input buffers can suffer differing problems depending on the application. For high noise environments, inputs are often times clamped hard to provide a wide noise margin. Such clamping schemes however can provide large voltage differences between the input node of the comparator and its respective reference input which can unfortunately cause the transition time of the buffer to suffer. For instance, for a general purpose input buffer, the reaction time of the buffer can be severely degraded due to slow transition times at the input. In particular, the portion of the transition edge between the initial state of an input signal and the input threshold crossing set by the reference signal is essentially wasted. Unfortunately, this period of time can vary significantly due to both internal and external factors such as: supply voltage levels, input clamping levels, input slew rate, input VOL/VOH levels, and so forth.